Taking Down the Dragon Heads Before Sighting Land

A settler's obligations began before the ship ever reached shore. Later legal tradition attributed to Ulfljot, credited with framing Iceland's earliest law code, required ships approaching land to remove carved dragon or monster head figureheads from their prows, on the stated reasoning that such fearsome imagery would frighten the landvaettir, the spirits of hills, rocks and waters, and provoke their hostility toward the new arrivals rather than securing their cooperation.

Egils Saga preserves a related but inverted use of the same belief: the exiled Egil Skallagrimsson raised a horse's head on a pole facing inland, explicitly invoking the landvaettir's hostility against king Eirik Blood-axe and his queen as a curse rather than a courtesy, showing that Norse settlers understood these spirits as forces that could be either placated for one's own benefit or deliberately provoked against an enemy. Together the fire rite establishing ownership and the caution shown toward the land's existing spiritual inhabitants show landnam functioning as a genuinely religious transaction, not merely a legal or practical one, in which the new settler had to negotiate standing with unseen powers already resident in the ground before any claim could be considered secure.